“Look at the photographs.”
I lowered the letter. The stack of pictures sat in the bottom of the green tin, face down, the broken rubber band curled beside them. My hand hovered over them for a long time.
I had spent forty years with two faces frozen at eight and six years old. A gap-toothed girl in braids. A curly-haired boy with two missing bottom teeth. I knew their faces better than my own.
I turned over the first photograph. A tall young woman in a royal-blue graduation gown looked back at me from under a coastal pine, squinting into the sun. She had Rachel’s chestnut hair, Rachel’s small chin, and, when she smiled, a tiny gap between her front teeth that braces had almost closed.
Then I turned over the second one, and the man in it was wearing my face.
Part 4: Find Thomas
It wasn’t my face the way it looked now, of course. It was the face I used to see in the shaving mirror on Larkspur Lane, the one I had at twenty-five, before the gray came in and the stroke pulled the left side down a little.
The young man stood in front of a blue pickup truck parked on a gravel lot. Behind him was a long, low building with a hand-painted wooden sign over the double doors. His sleeves were rolled up, his forearms were thick from work, and there was sawdust on his jeans.
His hair was still curly. Brown and springy, the kind that never stays flat no matter how much water you comb into it.
“Lucas,” I said. It was the first time I’d spoken his name out loud in years. I had stopped because it hurt too much, and people would look away when I said it.
I held the two pictures side by side, one in each hand, and looked from one to the other until they blurred. On the back of Abigail’s, in Rachel’s handwriting: “June 1995. Eighteen. Valedictorian. She gave the speech about her father.”
Her father. I read it twice.
On the back of Lucas’s: “Spring 2003. Twenty-four. His own shop, all paid for. He builds tables.”
I made a sound I didn’t recognize. Henry told me later he heard it through the open window next door and almost came over.
There were six more pictures. Abigail at maybe twelve, holding a fishing pole on a dock, scowling at the camera. Lucas at ten in a Little League uniform, grinning with all his grown-in teeth. Both kids at a kitchen table, around fourteen and twelve, with a birthday cake between them that said HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAD in blue icing and no candles.
On the back of that one, Rachel had written: “Every March 9th. They insisted.”
March 9 is my birthday.
I put the photographs down very carefully on the quilt, the way you’d set down something alive. Then I picked the letter back up, because there was still one paragraph at the bottom, crowded into the last few lines.
“Our children grew up looking at duplicate copies of your family portrait, Walter, constantly asking me to share stories about their wonderful father. I told them you were a good man who had to stay behind to keep them safe. I never told them the rest. I didn’t dare.”
“Our boy, who now goes by the name of Thomas, established his own carpentry business two states away in the valley town of Oak Ridge. It’s in the hills of western Pennsylvania. You can’t miss the sign. Abigail moves around too much for me to tell you where she’ll be, but Thomas knows how to find her. Thomas always knows how to find all of us.”
“Find Thomas, my darling Walter, and show him this tin so that he finally knows the whole truth about why his father had to stay behind.”
At the very bottom, smaller still, as though she’d squeezed it in at the last second: “Abigail made me promise I’d bring you the shell. She found it the summer she turned nine. She’s kept it for you ever since. — R.”
I looked over at the windowsill, at the small, pale scallop resting there in the late afternoon sun. FOR DADDYS DESK. No apostrophe.
Abigail had been nine, then. She’d found it a year after the bridge, on some beach I’d never seen, and decided it was the prettiest one. She’d carried it with her through the new names and the rented houses and the moves, and she’d given it to her mother eighteen years later to sneak back into a house she probably didn’t even remember.
She’d kept her promise. My little girl had kept the first promise she ever made me.
I sat with that for a while. The light went from gold to orange across the floorboards. Somewhere out front, Patrick was on his phone with the moving company, saying, “No, six is fine, six works.”
I thought about Joanne in her trench coat, and the man above her whose name I would never know, and the word “risk.” Part of me wanted to be furious, and I was, but it was a slow, tired kind of fury. Forty years of it had already been spent on the wrong thing.
I’d spent four decades angry at myself, at that print job, at a slick wooden bridge, and at the creek. I’d been angry at God on the bad nights. I’d never once thought to be angry at the people who’d sat in my kitchen and held my hand.
And Rachel. I thought about Rachel most of all.
I’d like to say I felt only gratitude, but that would be a lie, and I’ve had enough lies. There was a part of me, small and sore, that wanted to ask her why she never once found a way to tell me, even a whisper or a postcard with no name. Why she trusted me to sit with that grief for forty years but not to keep a secret for one.
I didn’t know the answer. Maybe there wasn’t one I’d like. But she had come back here in 2003 and sat on this bed, knowing the risk, to leave me the one thing she could. And she had raised our children to bake me birthday cakes every March 9 with no candles, because there was no one there to blow them out.
That wasn’t a woman who stopped loving her husband. That was a woman who never got the chance to stop.
There was a knock on the doorframe, firm, two raps. I jumped so hard the cane slid off the bed and clattered to the floor.
“Uncle Walt?” Patrick leaned in, one hand still on the frame, his brow creased with worry. “You’ve been quiet in here for almost an hour. You holding up all right?”
Without thinking, I gathered the letter and the photographs and slid them into the inside pocket of my cardigan. I didn’t decide to; my hands just did it, quick and smooth. Maybe some of Rachel’s habits had rubbed off on me after all.
I’d tell Patrick. I would. He’d earned it, and he was the only family I had in North Carolina. But Rachel had written “Do not trust Joanne” in a hand that nearly tore the paper, and I didn’t know who Joanne still knew, or who might ask Patrick an innocent question at a gas station. That story belonged to Thomas first.
“I’m doing much better than all right, Patrick,” I said.
He looked at me for a long moment, then at the slit mattress, the tailor’s shears, and the strips of yellowed tape on the floor. He opened his mouth, then closed it again. He’s a good boy. He gets that from Ray.
“The van’s coming at six,” he said gently. “We still need to load the den and this room. Dana’s got the cottage aired out, and she made up the bed with the blue blanket you like.”
“That’s real kind of her,” I said, and I meant it. “Tell her I’ll be there.”
“Okay.” He smiled, relieved. “You want me to grab the rest of Abby’s things?”
I looked at the windowsill. Then I reached over, picked up the seashell, wrapped it in its square of tissue, and put it in my shirt pocket, right over my heart.
“Everything except this,” I said.
For forty years, other people had made the decisions about my family. A man I’d never met had decided I was a risk. Joanne had decided I should accept the river. A district court clerk had decided what went on three certificates, and even Dr. Evans had decided I was too fragile to climb my own stairs.
Rachel had decided, too, and I understood why. But she’d ended her letter by handing the choice back to me.
For the first time in forty years, I wasn’t going to let anyone else answer for me.
“Let’s finish loading the truck right now, Patrick,” I said. “Because you and I have a very important road trip to take first thing tomorrow morning.”
He blinked. “A road trip? Uncle Walt, Dr. Evans said—”
“Dr. Evans said I shouldn’t be alone,” I said. “So I won’t be. You’re driving.”
I put both hands on the edge of Abigail’s bed and pushed. My left knee complained, and my right one shook, but they held. I stood up straight in the middle of my daughter’s room, and I didn’t reach for the cane on the floor.
Patrick stared at me, then at the cane, then back at me. Slowly, he bent down, picked it up, and held it out.
I took it, because I’m seventy-four and not a fool. But I tucked it under my arm instead of leaning on it, and I walked past him into the hall on my own two feet.
At the end of the hall, the door to the den stood open. My old oak desk was already wrapped in moving blankets, waiting for the van. I knew exactly which corner was under there, the empty one by the lamp, saved for forty years for a little girl’s seashells.
Tomorrow, I was going to drive north to a town in the Pennsylvania hills and look for a hand-painted sign over a woodshop. I was going to knock on the door, and when a curly-haired man with my face opened it, I was going to hold out a green biscuit tin.
And someday soon, if my legs held out and God was kind, I’d put a smooth pale scallop on a wooden desk, right where my daughter promised it would go.
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